Lucy strikes again

Thursday

Oct 17, 2013 at 10:40 AM

Vikings nation is flat on its back yet again.

Joe MellenbruchJournal Sports@Journal_Joe

Here we are once again, Purple Nation.

Once aloft a mountain of high expectations and championship aspirations, now battered and bruised after a hard fall. What was once supposed to be a promising season with a promising young team has become yet another chapter in the Vikings' underwhelming history.

Oh well. I can't say I'm surprised. Unfortunately, that doesn't make it any easier to bear.

Just call me Charlie Brown, and the Vikings are a cold, spiteful wench named Lucy.

The football was there for the kicking, wasn't it? It was right there, and this time, this season, Lucy promised she wouldn't pull it away.

Yet here I am, here we are, Vikings fans, flat on our backs, wondering how we could have been tricked yet again, Lucy's shrill, unforgiving laughter ringing in our ears.

I'm sick of it.

It hurts me to have to name this blog after my own pessimistic sentiments regarding the Minnesota Vikings, but times like these shed further light on the truth that I complain about every season.

Don't think for a second that I enjoy pointing out the numerous flaws that plague my favorite professional sports team in the entire world. In fact, it makes me weary every year. But I don't see the value in looking on the bright side when none such side exists, when I know that any glimmer that this team inspires will eventually be drowned out by emphatic failure.

The way the Vikings lose makes it all the more painful, too.

1998 was obviously a monumental disaster. 2009 was arguably worse. That isn't even to mention the four Super Bowl losses we endured in the 1970s, a period that I'm thankful not to have lived through. God only knows how cynical I'd be if I had a few title-game losses to dwell on. Let's all be thankful that isn't the case.

I know I sound like a broken record, and believe me, I'm tired of talking about these things just as much as you are hearing about them.

But, really? A 1-4 start? This is a new brand of disappointment for me, one I hadn't experienced as a Vikings fan before this year.

In 2012, the Vikings were transformed from a 3-13, last-place club into a playoff team in a matter of just 16 games, and now, after adding three first-round draft picks to a group that showed so much promise a year ago, we're stuck at the bottom of the NFC North once again.

How does that happen? How is that even possible?

That's what makes this team so frustrating. We're not the Lions or the Jaguars, franchises who have both grown accustomed to losing consistently, but rather, we're the Vikings, a team that sets its fan base atop a house of cards year in and year out, only to have those fans come crashing down to the table in a blaze of fluttering paper.

The 2013 season has been another gut check so far for Minnesota fans to endure.

Maybe Josh Freeman can get things turned around for us on Monday night. Maybe he won’t.

I’m not holding my breath, but like always, I’ll be watching anxiously this Sunday. If you do, too, proceed with caution.

This is the opinion of Joe Mellenbruch, a Devils Lake Journal reporter. Follow him on Twitter @Journal_Joe.